


beholder

by Sathanas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Foreshadowing, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 11:31:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sathanas/pseuds/Sathanas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Look at me.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





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Darkness now. In his dead eye, scratched of its sight by flashing hooks of electricity, Malekith is staring down the long throat of darkness to its deep heart, the place of origin where black blessings make the heavy flesh irrelevant. Distant now; he is stitched too tightly to the body that bears him up, his own flesh is cracked and smoking and he cannot remember how it feels to drift as formless as a thought — but there before him darkness persists and he _sees_.

"Give thanks for pain and insight," he breathes, half-mad with both, lying in Algrim's girded arms while many faceless Svartalfar strip away his armour and hard harness to prepare him for healing. Someone takes his hand briefly, as if what he is saying might mean something. "Algrim. Algrim, cut out my other eye to preserve this."

The many Svartalfar labour to restore the one eye, and Algrim does not cut out the other. Like contrary little children, Malekith thinks without anger. When their efforts to salvage his vision fail, he is clutched with grim relief more firmly than any joy or fury he has felt in thousands of years. The press of soft stasis has left him with a taste for blunted outward perception. Too long have the nine realms run him through riots of closed cycles and white noise and edges that touch imperfectly. Too long have they flowered at his feet, more foul than the shape of a jagged golden host crouched on backlit slopes or the smell of Svartalfheim's black sands burning silver. After so much bright catastrophe, half-blindness is a sanctuary, a hollow space where hard divisions melt and all of his thoughts fit together.

Still, he is lightsick and cold. Still, his mutilation reminds him keenly that he and his kind were skinned from the flanks of perpetuity; it should not be possible for any of them to suffer wounds that do not kill but will not heal. Malekith shudders as the tendons in his jaw squirm and fret, wondering if the Aether will want him wounded. There is a locked moment in his memory: he is reaching, full of intention, while the red thread of salvation lingers just beyond his hand. In that memory and in that moment, it is not quite reaching back. For all its power, the Aether is jealous and proud. Presented with a tarnished vessel, it balks — just long enough to burn and vanish. Just long enough for Malekith to realize that he is as sickly as the rotting worlds, his intentions slick with fear and bloodthirst and the last dregs of love; and that love is a knife for each and every one of those who wear the mask of his favour.

_Each and every one,_ Malekith thinks, _but for the ones I stole away. Come claim us now, depths; come, darkness. You must take us away from here._

Anxious and pained, he waits in the black sanctuary of his flagship, carapaced alone. Even Algrim has been sent away, punishment for petty disobedience, though he refuses to go far and simply paces slow circuits a level below. His heavy steps are resonant, a deep meter that warms the ship's peripherals and the body's bones. Carefully ignoring the small solace of warmth, Malekith lays himself open to the Aether's consideration. At top deck, starfields gleam maliciously through the plate glass overhead. It would be overwhelming, the sight of all those eyes and fires arrayed against him like bright-tipped lances, if he did not know to look further than their conceits. Willful, selfish glamour is in the distant stars. Malekith closes his eyes to them. Down the throat of darkness they go as cold ashes, swallowed by night, and he is calm. True dark skies hold nothing that would obscure the way forward.

  
  


Shards of another life are buried in Malekith's skin, grey as gathering shadow and soft, split lips. All he can know with certainty is that it was good, and that it is gone. The rest is incoherent, a string of sounds and sensations forming no meaningful narrative. Sometimes he wonders if all of his thoughts are his own. This is the problem with memories: they are turning, faceted things, the dry bones of many minds divided by light. They cannot be trusted.

Algrim assures him that there were other times and other places, well worth inhabiting. Gone, of course, and among them many that were willfully destroyed; but all for the best, he says. Think of the old life as a secret, shared between worthy confidants. Let sand sift over it. Let cities crumble just as they crystallized: without ceremony, without names. There is less longing to weather that way.

"True," Malekith says slowly, throat stretched long as Algrim presses it between his hands, closing contact seals to prepare him for stasis. Heedless black hibernation waits to swallow them all, as blank and inviting as forgiveness. Malekith spends a moment trying to catch Algrim's eye, then loses interest and instead watches shadows flicker in the high vaults of the ship. "Still. Think of all there is to forget. We have been witness to things that have since gone unseen. Things that would be lost without us."

"Terrible things."

"Yes," Malekith says wistfully.

Algrim touches fingers to the line of his jaw — a wordless warning: _be mindful of other ears_ — and then releases him. "The only important thing is that you remain secure. Resolute. It is unnecessary to preserve anything else," he says, his voice dispassionate, and he walks away without being dismissed.

Malekith does not watch him go. There are sour notes of judgement folded away in his long stride, in the rigid column of his spine. Sharp edges, rudely unsheathed. It is unpleasant to see these things in someone he knows so well and he has no will to contend with a high wall of resentment now. He wants obedience, rapport, quiet gratitude; all deserved, he tells himself, even with his face still raw from the rush of rising, ruined earth.

In the ship's vertical main chamber, Malekith stands at the rail and lets himself be seen. The Svartalfar, all the skeins of ready flesh still pledged to him, are braced in the bulwark, waiting through a last systems check before their slow descent into suspended animation can begin. So few they seem, though they scroll above and below into shadow, filling his vision. Pale masks glitter as they turn toward him. Jointlessly they move; silently they attend him. He thinks of trained beasts and machines, awaiting orders. He thinks of children, in need of reassurance.

He has no such thing to offer them, not now. No commands, no measured explanation, no power to spite their foes. The Aether's absence is an amputation, a strong limb severed. No matter how he reaches, he cannot feel it — but he must reach, again and again, relentlessly.

He remains there as the check completes and power banks down slowly, taking the Svartalfar — the last of them, the scraps of his army and all his kind — into deep stasis. Before they sleep, he makes certain that he is the last thing they see.

  
  


The Kursed emerge from the wastelands they have made: a soft fall of cinders that settle in silence; a sky full of acid nailed high above half-melted hills. Sometimes they seek Malekith out when their battles are done, victorious in his name, and he does not know what to say to them.

_Dark heart, do you remember your purpose? All bodies are built for suffering._

He understands why they come to him. It is not for great love or hatred, not because they think of him and remember old loyalty. No. They are shaking apart, down to their last, lingering atoms. They find him because he holds the Aether and the Aether is stillness. It is dissolution. It is quick, as darkness is hungry and _slow_.

So it has gone for as long as he can recall. Those who are in pain know that he end it. He finds that the duty grows plain to him, familiar in the way of a weapon's weight, dull in the way that very vivid things always seem to become over time. If he still feels any sense of immediacy or peril as diminished Kursed draw near, it comes when Algrim moves to intercept them; testing their temperments, perhaps, or else his own resolve. There is something thrilling in the gesture. Despite his power, legendary among those who once walked in darkness, Algrim could not stand against a single Kursed for long. He would be torn to wet fibres should even one turn on him with violence still clutched in hand.

But none ever do. They stop when he demands it, and wait as long as they must; they hear him through the madness of their perfect strength, they answer his questions. They merely nod, each and every one, when he finally says to them: "If you wish, the Aether can give you peace."

It can. He would not lie to them in that moment. There are certain particulars that go unmentioned — for instance, the Aether has never dealt directly in _peace_ — but this known to all Svartalfar. The hands and eyes of darkness are well-aware of what it means to be peaceful by darkness' touch.

Not every Kursed comes to crouch like a cold, gathered pyre at Malekith's feet; some take on the pain as pride and contrive ways to destroy themselves in battle, or simply fragment into base components, alone. Those who do seek his help, however, look calmly upon him even as he touches fingertips to the thin skin in the corners of their vulnerable eyes. Malekith suspects that they do not see him at all, that he is obscured by something truly enduring, truly illustrious. Something pure and blank inside.

  
  


Well before Svartalfheim bloomed dark on the end of the world-tree's finger, there was closed creation, the clean, primordial system suspended in a sphere devoid of intersecting lines. It bore no flaws. No suns, no shores. The point of origin. Home, such as it was.

Now Svartalfheim is carved from it, formed into dark cliffs and deep valleys and long steppes that reach to mountains rising above memory. Now Svartalfar build in jagged shapes and raise black ships that go unnamed. And now the Aether preserves this, lying coiled in a conquering hand, a true relic of that place where thinking and perceiving and precognition ran black through chains of shared synapses. Inscrutable, it serves no master but one. Malekith had been no more than a hollow skin when it caught him up, braiding itself around the curves and angles of his strange individuality. Even at that first touch, it had given him a poisoned gift. He knew what had happened. He saw what had changed. He _remembered_.

"We were one," he had hissed through obsidian teeth, breath molten, eyes cold. He was being held up by someone who would be called Algrim the Strong; there were bodies, pressed close against them or glimmering across an impossible distance. "We were here, but this is not — " Then, in fear or fury, he looked to Algrim, to others, to certain faces without knowing why; and the red threads in his peripheral vision seethed in sudden recognition; and, startled, he had laughed: "Ah, this. If only you could see it. This is strange, but perhaps I know you."

Stranger, now; Malekith finds himself surrounded by half-known faces, so few of them stitched to clear memory. It troubles him sometimes to look upon them; but he must always look. The Aether is a lens that sharpens paths and draws every eye to behold him. He is learning to see this, always and abstractly, as though he stands outside himself. Even if he does not understand it, he _sees_.

**Author's Note:**

> VILLAINOUS SPACE ELVES. (throws hands up helplessly)


End file.
